


A Blue Christmas

by FrenchRoast



Category: Jurassic Park (Movies), Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: Gen, Gender or Sex Swap, Genderbending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 18:20:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5466395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchRoast/pseuds/FrenchRoast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Character study of gender-swapped Owen Grady as a kid and as she begins to work with the Raptor Squad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Blue Christmas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [regonym](https://archiveofourown.org/users/regonym/gifts).



> Regonym, I hope you enjoy this! I've never written anything gender-swapped/genderbent before, so I tried my best. I wish you a very happy Yuletide!!  
> 

Christmas of ’88, 6 year-old Rowen didn’t get an abundance of gifts; money was tight, the way it usually is in families with multiple kids. There was no shiny new bike waiting for her under the tree like there would be for her friend Jordan down the street. But Rowen’s mother did manage (with some luck and the help of a friend who worked at the nearest Toys R Us) to get Rowen a complete set of the dinosaurs from her favorite movie that year: The Land Before Time.

The rest of Rowen’s Christmas break was spent setting up elaborate re-enactments of scenes from the movie and creating new adventures for all her new dinosaurs. Rowen made them all work together as a team, whether they were facing a Sharptooth or just her older brother’s old Skeletor action figure. Spike was her favorite.

\----------

An island full of dinosaurs. Rowen couldn’t believe it existed; it sounded too much like a Disney park to be real. But the scientists talking about it were on the news, not Unsolved Mysteries, so maybe the island wasn’t a lie. Rowen decided when she grew up, she would find it.

\----------

San Diego wasn’t what changed Owen’s decision to find the dinosaur island, but it didn’t hurt. She was moving on from childhood. Owen had decided to start an internet company and become rich, once she could go to college, where she could use a computer that ran something better than Windows 3. And once she figured out what the company would do.

\----------

Of course there was no money for college, and of course Owen had to find a way to pay for it. A handful of private colleges she never applied to offered her scholarships that would never be enough to cover the costs. Then Owen got the call from the Navy recruiter.

A year and three months later, Seaman Apprentice R. Owen Grady watched 2 towers fall and realized that her college tuition could turn out to be much more costly than she’d assumed. Owen sighed and tried to focus on training the shepherd mix she’d been assigned a couple weeks ago. Alpha was a smart dog, but she had a nasty nipping habit they really needed to get out of her system.

 

* * * * * Christmas 2013 * * * * *

 

“I just don’t understand why you can’t come home this year, Rowen,” her mother said over the phone as she put a casserole into the oven. “You always get to come home for Christmas since you left the Navy. Why is this year any different?”

“Mom, you know I can’t talk about everything I do,” Owen said. She sat in a plastic chair, one leg tucked under the other, which dangled, her foot barely touching the floor. A large cylinder of metal and glass with a heat lamp resting above sat in front of her. The top quarter of so of the cylinder was full of straw, as well as 4 giant ivory eggs. Owen was the only one in the room.

“I know, but I thought they were giving you regular vacations with this new job. I know it pays more than that dolphin training thing, but is this job really worth missing Christmas for, Rowen? You just started there a couple months ago and they’re already taking Christmas.”

Owen rolled her eyes at the continued use of Rowen. “I just don’t have a choice this time,” she said as she noticed a crack in the egg furthest to the left. “If it makes you feel better, I don’t think it’ll be a problem next year. Did you guys get the presents I sent?”

“Yeah, your father opened his by accident.”

“They were supposed to be gift-wrapped.” Now a second egg was cracking. They were all starting to wobble, ever so slightly.

“You know your father. He doesn’t get the whole Amazon thing. He went all the way through the gift-wrapping.” The egg on the left, the one with the first crack, wobbled and fell ever so slightly to the side. More cracks were appearing, now in all of them.

“Mom? I’m sorry, but I have to go. I’ll call later. Love you,” Owen said, and hung up the phone with one hand, sticking it in her pocket as she stood and stepped up to the incubator. Did they really have to hatch on Christmas Eve? Owen checked the chart. It listed the names she was supposed to give them as they were born, with the tags to attach. She was going to have to do this all herself.

She cursed whoever was responsible for the timing of this. Wu wouldn’t be back in the lab for another two days. Barry was here, but they were trading shifts precisely because almost no one else qualified was here. _Oh, shit,_ Owen thought. _I’ve got to get Barry in here. They can’t just imprint on me or I’ll be the only one who can work with them._ Owen tapped out a frantic text “Wake up the raptors are hatching NOW”. She pulled the tags from the chart and laid them out on the table in order. Then she noticed the names.

Holly. Ivy. Joy. Noel.

Owen stared. Was this supposed to be a joke? Or, more likely, was this the plan? Have raptors born on or just before Christmas, give them gimmicky names to make them more attractive to audiences?

“Screw that,” Owen declared as she looked around for a pen. She grabbed a Sharpie from a coffee mug full of writing tools and headed back to the incubator. Barry burst into the room right as she was getting ready to scrawl out the Christmasy names.

“I’m not too late, am I?”

“Just in time. They haven’t pushed through the shells yet, but it’ll be soon. Here,” Owen held out the sheet of paper from the chart. “Look what they want us to name them.”

Barry took the paper and grimaced almost instantaneously. “These are not going to be cutesy animals. They do not need cutesy names.”

“Right. I’m thinking we go old-school. Beta, Charlie-”

“—Delta, Echo?”

“Exactly.” Owen kept her eyes on the eggs now. That one on the left was going to be out before the others.

“I like it. I’ll fix the tags,” he volunteered. “You watch them.”

 _Snap!_ went the egg to the left, and then a high and somewhat grating _Screeee_ cry came out from under the loose shell fragment. Owen hesitated for a moment, but reached into the incubator and pulled the fragment off so she could see the first raptor, the one they would call Beta.

She was… _blue!?_ A bright royal blue? Had someone forgotten to mention that? All the pictures Owen had ever seen of the raptors that InGen had engineered showed them being greenish or grayish or brownish, or some mix. Normal reptile colors.

“Barry…this one is blue.”

“Okay,” he said, continuing to work on the tags.

“BLUE.”

Barry caught the odd tone of Owen’s voice and finally looked up. Now he noticed the bright blue, too. “What the hell…?”

“I don’t think we can call her Beta,” Owen said as the blue dinosaur continued the slow work of freeing herself from the eggshell. “Fuck, let’s just call her Blue. That’s better than Beta anyways, and it’ll still work alphabetically.”

“It’ll be easy enough to remember, I suppose.”

“Unless all the others are blue.”

“They can’t all be blue,” Barry argued. He handed Owen the corrected tag. “This has to be some kind of fluke. They each had different engineers and geneticists. One of them made a mistake.”

“Or one of them really likes the color blue.” Owen grinned. “That one in the back is about to make it through. We’ll know then.”

That one turned out to be brownish-green, more like they had expected. “I dub thee Charlie,” Owen said, rubbing the top of Charlie’s head lightly. She did the same to Blue. And to Delta, and Echo, as they hatched. Delta and Echo were also more normal shades of grey and brown and green. They fed them the food Wu had left, and the raptors settled down for several hours. Barry and Owen rolled cots into the incubator room, but it was morning before the baby raptors woke up. Hatching was hard work. With nothing else to do, Owen decided they should let them out of the incubator to play for a little bit.

Even though Owen knew these animals were going to be deadly in only months, for now, she was just happy to enjoy the way they were already trying to mimic Barry and herself.

“These raptors are sharp,” she said to Barry as he held Delta. Echo was hopping onto and off of his ankles. Blue was perched on her shoulder, rather parrot-like. Charlie was chasing her tail in-between the two of them. “I don’t think we can wait as long as Wu wants. We’ll have to start the training in a couple of days instead of a couple of weeks, or this might not work.”

“He won’t like that. He cares more about the research.”

Owen sighed. Too many of these people didn’t understand that these animals were not pets or robots you could just program. It was the same problem she’d run into in the Navy, and later. Dolphins—every animal—had their own motivations. Instincts. There was no way to control for that. No way to make them do what you wanted unless they wanted to, and to do that, you had to understand them. Only this was going to be worse, because no one understood anything about these animals. No one who worked here. Owen had barely been able to get two words from Dr. Grant, she couldn’t find Dr. Sadler, and all Ian Malcolm did was flirt and send repeated emails warning her to stay as far away from InGen as possible.

Sometimes he flirted in the emails, and that was just weird.

Masrani was the only reason she’d finally given in. He seemed to respect that they were wild animals. He was also an idiot, but he cared about the dinosaurs. And that was something. Besides, last thing Owen wanted was for these raptors to end up with someone who wouldn’t try to understand them. Thank god they'd let her choose her co-trainer.

Also, she was training fucking velociraptors. Fucking coolest job in the whole goddamn world, and it was hers. Officially hers, now that they’d imprinted on her and on Barry. Owen wasn’t even sure that was a thing with raptors, but it was with birds, so it was possible.

“We should use their names as much as possible while it’s just the six of us,” Owen told Barry. “If they try to argue about changing the names back, we’ll say it’s too late.”

“Imprinting?”

“Exactly.”

\----------

As Owen expected, what’s-her-name (Masrani’s right-hand woman) had a shit-fit over the name changes when she found out a month later. Wu had no choice but to back Owen and Barry and the new names.

“How are they?” Owen asked as Barry walked up. “Settling into the juvenile enclosure okay?”

“They love it. Blue was already testing out new jumping places, but they won’t outgrow it before the final enclosure is finished. How are you?” Barry asked. “I’m so glad I didn’t have to go to that meeting. Dearing's memo was not very nice.”

Owen smiled. “You should’ve seen her face. Red as Rudolph’s nose. She was pissed. Apparently, our rash decision to change their names destroyed many of her holiday PR plans.”

Barry shook his head. “You enjoy riling her up more than you should.”

“I do. That I do,” Owen said. Then, thoughtfully: “Maybe I should ask her out.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Well, let’s see…I train people-eating dinosaurs for a living. I don’t think there are a lot of sane people out there that do that.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“I’m just saying, she and I both work with dinosaurs, and we clearly drive each other crazy. How could adding a few alcoholic drinks to the mix not make things better?”

Barry stared at her.

“Okay, not better. More interesting.”

Barry shook his head. “Just stay away from the raptors if you do. Delta’s been snippy lately. Charlie keeps accidentally hitting her with her tail.”

Owen nodded. “I’m gonna go check on them now. Haven’t seen them since this morning. Stupid meeting.” They parted ways, and Owen made her way to the new juvenile enclosure. It was actually far too large for them right now, but Owen wanted to move them while they were still relatively safe to move with few restraints. Another month or two and they’d need to be immobilized before being moved. This way, they would have several months before that became a problem. Owen stopped several steps back from the enclosure so she could quietly watch the four raptors playing in the enclosure. There were a lot of new toys in this enclosure.

Blue wasn’t quite so bright blue now; most of the blue seemed to be fading into a purplish brown hue that her geneticist suspected would eventually become mostly mottled brown like the others. Several bright blue places remained, including a streak on either side.

“Don’t worry, girls,” Owen said. “I know you’re more than show ponies, and I’m not going to forget it.”


End file.
